Alfred Tennyson: The serious Legacy explores the critics' response to the paintings of the nineteenth-century English poet such a lot heavily linked to the Victorian period. possibly greater than the other Victorian poet, Tennyson's recognition has waxed and waned within the century considering the fact that his demise. He has been on the other hand sanctified and vilified for his selection of material, social outlook, morality, or strategies of versification. His recognition has weathered even the main vitriolic makes an attempt to discredit either the fellow and his writings; and as feedback of the past due 20th century demonstrates, Tennyson's declare to pre-eminence one of the Victorians is now unchallenged. Laurence Mazzeno starts this narrative research of Tennyson feedback with an examine how Tennyson was once appeared by means of his contemporaries, ahead of launching an in depth exam of twentieth-century feedback. A bankruptcy is dedicated to the interval instantly following Tennyson's loss of life, whilst a iteration of post-Victorians reacted violently opposed to what they thought of his sappy sentimentalism, cloying moralism, and insensitive jingoism. next chapters describe how critics resurrected Tennyson, highlighting either his technical mastery and his social feedback. particular realization is given to significant biographers and critics comparable to Harold Nicolson, the poet's grandson Sir Charles Tennyson, Jerome Buckley, R. B. Martin, Michael Thorn, and Peter Levi. a last bankruptcy makes a speciality of the methods Tennyson and his paintings were addressed via poststructuralist critics. in the course of the research, Mazzeno demonstrates that the critics' response to Tennyson finds as a lot approximately themselves and the severe prejudices in their personal occasions because it does concerning the Victorian Laureate and his poetry.

This e-book proposes a clean and unique interpretation of Keats' use of classical mythology in his verse. Dr Aske argues that classical antiquity seems to be to Keats as a ideal fiction, authoritative but disconcerting, and his poems symbolize demanding endeavours to come back to phrases with the impression of that fiction.

This ebook situates John Clare's lengthy, prolific yet usually badly ignored literary lifestyles in the wider cultural histories of the Regency and prior Victorian classes. the 1st part considers the development of the Regency peasant-poet and the way Clare played this function on phases comparable to the London journal.

Yeats and the good judgment of Formalism bargains with formalism as a philosophy in Yeats’s works and the way that during flip impacts either his paintings and his social imaginative and prescient. Vereen M. Bell’s linking of “formalism” and “philosophy” stems from a meditation via Yeats in a manuscript be aware: “I am consistently feeling an absence of life's personal values at the back of mythought.

C. Stedman, the foremost American scholar of his day, says that, “The influence of Alfred Tennyson has been almost unprecedentedly dominant, fascinating, extended, yet of late has somewhat vexed the public mind” (151). After providing extensive commentary on dozens of the poems to assess the “inherent quality” (153) of Tennyson’s poems, Stedman proclaims that the laureate has greater breadth of interest and mental ability than his rivals Arnold and Browning. Conventionally, Stedman judges Idylls of the King to be Tennyson’s “master-work,” calling it the “greatest narrative poem since Paradise Lost” (175).

Spurred by the work of Matthew Arnold and academic critics such as George Saintsbury, the quest to determine who holds the higher place among writers was considered part a critic’s role. While the standards for such judgments might vary, one could be almost certain to find in any commentary longer than a few hundred words some attempt to “place” a poet and rank his or her achievement against others who practiced the craft. Among the earliest summary judgments of the recently deceased laureate was that published by Edmund Gosse, longtime admirer of Tennyson but 32 ♦ A MIXED LEGACY: 1892–1916 not universally laudatory in his commentary.